This week’s episode is a special one featuring our cover of “Dizzy” and 3 other tracks in celebration of almost-birthday-boy Jim Adkins; Our cover of Crooked Fingers’ Call To Love, an original composition called “Fortune Teller” that maybe makes mention of Jim himself, and a brand new cover of Jim’s song “Hell” that was released on his solo album.
Listen now on Spotify or Anchor!
Or read on below for the official transcript
Official Transcript:
Heads up, but this week’s episode is a bit of an outlier on this season and will be a little different than previous episodes.
Since this will be published just 1 day shy of Jim Adkins birthday I thought I’d focus this episode on some unique releases, some which will be heard for the first time today on this show.
I want to kick this off with this week’s cover selection, pulled from 2007’s Chase This Light, with Dizzy.
I only just managed to pick up a new piece of gear a couple weeks ago, my new midi keyboard, which has opened up my capabilities for these covers and I’m pretty excited about where some of the new ones are headed. Dizzy is the first production I used it for to add some piano and string arrangements, which has always been a huge draw to my ears when it comes to Jimmy Eat World’s records.
The last songs on the record tend to fall into my “best of the best” pile when it comes to these albums and Dizzy is no exception. I’m pretty sure I could listen to just the final-tracks off every record for the rest of my life and be wholly satisfied with that rotation.
I’ll cap off today’s episode with the band’s original recording but I’ve got a couple other tracks to show you before we get there. First, here’s my version of “Dizzy”.
[Play Dizzy]
Next up I want to share an original song that I re-recorded the other week. I wrote this song when I was living by myself in Barrie, Ontario last summer and was just trying to have some fun; knowing absolutely no one in the city and being mostly still house-bound while working remotely left a lot of time to explore other types of songwriting that I hadn’t made the time for yet.
The inspiration for the song was really an audible vision board, where I let myself get a little ridiculous thinking about what a great future would look like for me, and I took all sorts of liberties here.
The song was originally written as part of a 6-part EP called the JA-6 that loosely followed the same ideas and storyline presented here, but it never really properly formulated and somewhere along the way I abandoned bits of that project and poached some for others that seemed better suited.
This song’s called “Fortune Teller”.
[Play Fortune Teller]
Rumour has it that there might be a Part 2 to Fortune Teller brewing but, I don’t actually have a crystal ball and frankly a lot of the whole sorcery and magic stuff freaks me out a little bit, so I’ve gotta give it a little more time before I can say anything for sure.
Next up I want to feature a re-make of a cover… or is it just a different adaptation of the original song at this point? I don’t know.
When I set out to do this project where I recreate all of Jimmy Eat World’s songs, I wanted to include the covers they did as well since I’m of the mind that a bands cover songs selection are as just as much a part of the bands releases as the original recordings themselves with each one giving you a little more insight to where they draw their own inspiration from. Plus, a lot of the one’s the band has done are really good – their Superchunk cover is almost better than the original if not for the fact that when you play them back to back, they hold their own equally.
I love learning what my favourite bands listen to because then I can poach those bands for my own collection if I like them. I actually felt like I hit a literal gold mine when Jim started posting Spotify playlists because there’s so many great artists featured there that had never really made their way to me before. Or in some cases, I got a nice throwback that makes me feel like we’re on the same wavelength-music wise which somehow has the added bonus of making me like this band even more.
One of those artists is Erich Bachmann of Crooked Fingers and Archers of Loaf who has jumped my personal charts a lot in the last couple years after I discovered them through Jim; So today’s cover song feature is “Call To Love”.
I tried to make mine a bit more rock-heavy than the band did and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
[Play Call To Love]
Okay, I know this has been an unusual amount of music releases for my podcast in a single episode, but I’ve got just one more for you guys and this one is brand new.
I was late to the party when I found out Jim had released a solo album but I jumped on it once I found out about it and even went so far as to buy the vinyl despite not having a record player. It’s actually a great little record and, since I was speaking of covers a few minutes ago, I’d argue Jim’s cover of “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” featured on the record is better than the original. I wasn’t at all a fan of that song growing up and that’s a whole other thing we can get into on another episode but, I love his version of it. If you haven’t checked out the album yet, make sure you do.
As my final feature song, I chose “Hell”. I’m a big fan of the guitar work on the original recording and I might’ve gotten a little ridiculous with my own.
[Play Hell]
Thanks very much for listening to this special episode of Static Unveiled today and just in case you’re listening, Happy birthday Jim and thanks for all the music you create and share with us.
Here’s “Dizzy” by Jimmy Eat World.
Crooked Forest 